Beauty and the Nation

Christina E. Firpo explores the development of beauty culture during the interwar years, showing how women's faces and bodies became contested sites for envisioning what it meant to be Vietnamese in the modern world.

Christina E. Firpo is professor of history at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She is the author of Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920-1945 (2020) and The Uprooted: Race, Childhood, and Imperialism in Indochina, 1890-1980 (2016).